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Singtel will federate its hosting facilities across Asia to create a single cloud for its customers.

The company appears not to be taking the full public cloud plunge, announcing yesterday that it will “launch a regional PowerON Compute cloud service in the second half of this year.“ The new offering “will enable customers with regional operations to access virtual capacity across multiple clouds, but manage their resources from a single portal” and will mean ”Customers can look forward to a seamless regional cloud offering that will make it easier to manage their cloud resources- that‟s one contract, one bill and one management portal, with access to multiple clouds across the region,” said John Paitaridis, Managing Director, of Optus Business, Singtel's Australian outpost. The clouds will reside in Sydney, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Details are thin about just what will be on offer, but officials said customers will be offered the chance to “get apps closer to their customers” thanks to replicated data centres that will make application porting easy. But officials stopped short of saying customers would be able to shunt workloads between Singtel locations, shaking heads at our mention of vMotion at a Distance while confirming that VMWare's vCloud Director will likely hum away behind the scenes.

The company will also introduce a cloud storage service, offering a virtual SAN and generic cloud storage. Details are still skimpy, but the offering again seems tuned to deeper engagements than casual credit-card-based accounts.

At the Sydney event where PowerON was discussed, the company also launched a range of mobility management services it hopes will help buyers to surf the BYOD wave. Managed mobility services will see Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone devices taken under the wing of a management portal, automagically cleansed of security worries and remotely wiped if things come to that. New mobility consulting services will help with this kind of thing and also advise on and assist with mobile website development.

Regional voice customers also have a new toy: a flat regional roaming rate for voice, which should mean less bill shock for travelling execs. ®